ViaCrucis
Confessional Lutheran
- Oct 2, 2011
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Maybe not necessarily an intention to debate but I like seeing what people think and maybe gain new perspectives.
I personally feel like because we have such a diverse nation making the US strictly a Christian country would create more tension between people. We have denominations that can get testy, saying their branch of belief is more correct than another, and I’ve personally encountered people who more...forcefully tell others that Muslim, Jewish, etc religions are wrong. Maybe if we weren’t so forceful, people would be more open to what Christianity has to offer.
Why do YOU think the church should or should not be separated from the government?
In the Lutheran tradition we have something referred to as the doctrine of the two kingdoms. Like in most things in Lutheranism it is part of the broader Law-Gospel dialectic we hold.
In this case the idea is that there are "two kingdoms", there's the lefthand kingdom, the civil sphere, the state, etc; and there's the righthand kingdom, the Church. It is the responsibility of the state and civil powers to execute justice, to provide order for society, to rule by the Law to curb against evil, serve justice, etc. The Church, on the other hand, lives and abides by the Gospel.
This idea in a lot of ways goes back much further, to St. Augustine's City of God, where he writes about the distinction between the city of man, and the city of God; these two cities are not the same and should never be confused. We can never confuse or conflate the kingdoms of this world, the powers of this world, with God's kingdom. God's kingdom is not of this world, and it never can be.
The father of the US Constitution, James Madison, apparently actually credits Luther's ideas on the two kingdoms as a major contributing factor in the growing idea of a separation between the secular and the ecclesiastical; an idea picked up by John Locke who was also one of the major influences on the nascent American republic.
The Church can never be a government, and a government can never be the Church. The Church has a spiritual and moral obligation to be the instrument of the Cross, not a people of the sword. Whenever this line is blurred, bad things happen.
-CryptoLutheran
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